


Albatross

by thehobblefootalchemist



Series: their fathoms dim and winding [2]
Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Other, an introspective piece this time, because I can't shut my Meta Brain off, covering Rogue Nation through Fallout
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 03:12:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18044378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehobblefootalchemist/pseuds/thehobblefootalchemist
Summary: albatross – sometimes used metaphorically to mean a psychological burden that feels like a curse-"That's the point.I know Lane."





	Albatross

She knows him, yes, she says in response to her superior’s question. _Of_ him, anyway, and little else. When she’s through with the dossier Atlee places on the desk she knows a great deal more, and is overcome with purpose. It is not hard at all for her to agree to an undercover mission.

When she meets him in person, pride is a bitter pill to swallow for an amendment in internal understanding—claiming knowledge after a single spoon-feeding session of photographs and lines of text was the assertion of a fool. The moment her cover passes muster she dedicates herself, learning his methods and his motives and all the subtle shifts of expression upon his face. As months (even, occasionally, private conversations) pass she does come to feel as if she knows him. It is an arsenal of awareness that she does not prefer to dwell upon, but flits in bits and snatches across her mind some nights.

By Austria awareness has become familiarity. Even after a failed mission she knows she can needle him; bluster saved her life after London and it does its job well now. But the gun she tosses onto his table is over an invisible line. In consequence she learns new things: that he must have a purpose beyond her scope for keeping her alive, because he can and will shoot someone for less than what she’s done; and that the simple act of him standing and approaching her is enough to make her lock her knees. They have stood this close together before, however, and she can still hold her head high.

Upon their return to London she’s forced to confront the irrefutability that she understands her target better than her handler. Walking into the cemetery for her rendezvous with the former she hardly knows what to think anymore—all she’s certain of is that she’s angry to the point of exhaustion, and that she is not going to enjoy her inevitable reflection on yet another commonality between her and the man, she soon finds out, that had apparently been quite aware she’d been a double-agent all along. He meanwhile seems to take satisfaction in their shared betrayal, remarkably comradely as they stray from the company of the others, and each of the accusations she levels toward him after his invitation to honesty are met with aplomb (save for his single smirk—that and the mild timbre of laughter accompanying it are far more bitter than flippant, and she suspects she might be the only person able to see or hear the fractures beneath). Then Vinter’s interruption blows apart their strange equal footing and she’s left even further to sea than before.

She knows that she is happy, somewhere, as she watches the white mist take him, but there is a sense of disquiet too. Brandt, Benji, Luther, Ethan. He had shot at them all—and yet not her. Even though there had been more than enough bullets to ‘kill’ her too. If there is any meaning to the half-noticed notion it is ignored, kicked to the side and forcibly forgotten as she drives away. But even so…cynicism and pragmatism having long since married and taken up within her, she has a buried feeling that this day won’t be the last that they see of each other.

 

Time passes. Fickleness and irony conspire for her to be brought in only long after she had stopped wishing to be.

 

It’s because she knows him, they say…in condemnation. In accusation, as if the selfsame organization was not who sent her to be near him in the first place. The ultimatum: take him out or they will be ‘forced’ to assume ‘certain things’. Scathing laughter she cannot let escape roils in her stomach; nausea claws the back of her throat. Blank white walls seem to shrink around her, the drone of fluorescent lighting in her ear like feedback from a perimeter fence, and she says yes because there is nothing else.

In Paris she is swamped by the revelation that the sight of him can still stop her cold. Not just a memory anymore, or the shadowy pursuant force that often tread her dreams—the man himself again, and she knows he can see her too. The monochrome photograph on the table at MI6, unsettling at the time, is now far and away preferable—nothing, nothing compared to his stare’s genuine blue and the riveted recognition now shining in it. Her aim is thrown and so is her chance, and so is she when outside force shatters their eye contact’s endless second.

That she knows him—it leaves her mouth aloud during their desperate search in Kashmir. Something of which she’s become so bone-deep certain that she’s hardly conscious of speaking it; as immutable a fact as the tickdown on the timer they’ve yet to find. What she finds first is his gaze again, which turns and locks on her own across the gulf between them as if magnetized to it. The rest of the world smears into blur and background noise and she is sprinting.

When she wakes tied to a chair she has mere seconds for it to sink in that, for whatever reason, she has not been killed. The twin rasps of his beard and his voice manifest close to her ear, speaking words that are harsh in a tone bizarrely like gentleness, and each one is a piece of kindling thrown onto the blaze of contempt catching light inside her chest. Memory of his fingers lying against her cheek amidst surrounding gravestones—the first and only other time he’d ever actually touched her—is close at hand. She’d gladly risk the ropes around her neck in order to get her hands around his own.

She gets her chance amidst Benji’s peril. The feral qualities in his fighting style scale back when she enters the fray: time and again he proves that with her he aims only to incapacitate rather than kill (a distinction that should have hardly mattered considering the nuclear device not ten feet away, but one which her observation skills refuse nonetheless to let slide), leaving an advantage for her to take and take him down with. When it comes to tying him up in turn, however, she relegates that to her friend—she knows she’s like to kill him if she touches him any more.

It is to her whom he speaks after waking, as the seconds count down. To her whom he looks just before devastation takes him following the failure of the bomb. He grinds his cheek into the floorboards with a snarl far more selfish than mere defeat of his plans could cause, and she knows it is because he had been expecting to die. Wanting to. And now that he hasn’t… 

They will be seeing each other again.

She knows.


End file.
